04/12/06

For some reason I keep wanting to write “08”

The boys are in school; both of them, at the same time. It has been weeks, and it feels like it; more like MONTHS. It was 2 weeks ago day before yesterday that Gary took the kids to Seattle and that seems so long ago.

A cool Connor story: He’d gotten behind in his reading due to being ill the last 3 days before break, and then again on Monday last week. I can’t believe that I let that go by-it hadn’t even occurred to me to consider that Connor might be behind and feeling a little lost. I’d forgotten about him having been sick and missing those days. He came home from school on Monday upset; calling his school “stupid”, which he’d never done before. A bit at a time he revealed that the crux of his upset was his reading time at school where he was used to being able to choose a book for himself and this time the class was reading something together. (He said, “Reading has gone from being my favorite subject to being my worst!”) He said that they were supposed to write in a reading journal and that he didn’t understand the study questions. He had a substitute that day and he indicated that she’d shown a kind of contemptuous annoyance when he’d tried to ask her about them. I suggested that he ask his regular teacher, tell her that he needed some help understanding what the study questions were asking for. He vehemently refused that as an option. I sent her an e-mail describing all this. After he was dropped off I went out to tell him that it was perfectly understandable that he feel lost and disoriented after missing so much school—and that I’d forgotten to consider that as a factor in his return to school. But he stopped me and said “You don’t have to send that e-mail. I talked to Mrs. Hanson.” And when my eyes widened in surprise, he said very matter-of-factly, “I faced my fears.” His teacher had sent him home with the book that he was behind the rest of the class in reading together, and the reading journal as well. He was so eager to get to the journal questions. He was really buoyant, joyful. He said reading was his best subject again and spontaneously told me many times: “I love you, Mom.” And nothing seemed to dent that, even when we had a bit of a tussle over some math homework he was doing. Momentarily irritated with me, his happiness reasserted itself.

I wonder what helped him to face his fears? What changed his mind? And I want to highlight for him again the joyful feeling inside that comes from successfully facing his fears.

That’s a neat thing to see him showing courage in the face of challenges. I’m proud of him.

Maybe he and I can have another good talk about it. We’ve been able to have some talks that seemed mutually satisfying, and felt like we were being authentic with each other.

Scott’s making break-throughs, too. Yesterday we met one of the kindergarten teachers at Skyline, and she thought he showed signs of readiness to be in a kindergarten classroom. We skated yesterday, too, and he 1) took a private lesson (he’d steadfastly refused them except for the lesson he’d had the first day we ever went skating last year.) 2) skates completely independent of me and plays with the instructor’s son 3) for the first time began to skate backward, competently. 4) Began crossing his blades over. I’m amazed at how well he’s doing: it was only a few weeks ago that he was skating on his little plastic “blades”, refusing to do much without me holding his hand, wanting to just play in the game room with the turned-off machines rather than skate. Now he’s all over the place on the roller blades that Connor outgrew. He has a natural sense of his body, just like Connor.

I’m almost finished with a book by a woman with Asperger’s syndrome: “Pretending to be Normal”. What’s interesting is that I can relate to much of the experience she describes, in having that sort of a nervous system. The literal-minded-ness; the difficulty with things being left uncompleted, the trouble generalizing from one situation to another. The getting overwhelmed by details and losing sight of the big picture.

It certainly would explain the difficulties I’m having at this point (the “point” being since Scott turned 3) in the boys’ development where I have such a hard time with the multiple demands and multi-tasking and noise that I’ve even thought of it as “suffering”. I seem to “suffer” from the attributes that go along with raising kids, to the point that I feel like I need to “recover! That seems almost funny to me.

Some of what she said about being very alone in her experience and it taking a while to dawn on her that not everyone was having a similar internal experience.

Here’s a sort of case in point: listening to a panel discussion that included a guy named Michael Rubin, I remembered that I’d heard something about him before. I just spent over a half hour tracking down that broadcast and felt unwilling and unable to let it go. The phrase that tantalized me was :..a hawk on national security matters.’

I am overwhelmed by trees. Like the animals that Temple Grandin describes in her book, and like an autistic person, though much less intense, I am not able to filter the sensory impressions coming in (in regards to kids and their kid things) and so go on overload very quickly. And I experience the overload as distressing.

That’s why it was very interesting to read the author’s description of what family life was like in interaction with her Asperger’s. Because it reminded me of me—in how I feel each bump (i.e: kids’ fighting kids’ yelling, kids’ talking to me both at once, multiple demands, being interrupted, cleaning up kids’ messes) and the discomfort from each bump adds a tax to my negotiating it. So I’m wondering if there’s a possibility that whatever is happening with the person with Aspergers’s nervous system is present to a much milder degree in mine. And perhaps that explains why I’ve been so much more sensitive to emotional stimulation than the people around me; and why I need more in terms of intimacy, because I suffer in its absense. I think I may have always, as a child, had a somber, or even sad tone inside, because the sense of true connection and understanding was missing. I think I accepted that tone, the way I accepted all the circumstances of my life, as a given—as the sea I swam in and therefore was largely unaware of it.

Maybe it explains my need for honesty—where I feel uncomfortable with social lies—I think some of that goes back to my need for intimacy. I feel the effects of obscuring honesty where others do not. And the truth is that most people “don’t want to hear it.”

Maybe this gives something of a clue as to a direction to go in pursuing medications for my mood.

Well, I need a bath.

But maybe I’ll write this down first: I did call Darlene to respond to her note. She sounded very glad to hear from me; the conversation was friendly and on my side not tainted with the usual feelings of aversion and suppressing a desire to get away. So maybe this signals a return to the slate we had when we first moved back here: the being of an open mind and actively looking for positives; giving the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps what I’ve done is gone through the process of recovering from Christmas 2005—I honored it and the need for it and now I see that I’ve come to the logical completion that you get to when you stick with the process. I honored my need to stay away from her; now I feel like I can approach her again without it being unpleasant. So that means potentially a source of discomfort in my life may be alleviated somewhat.

I have some unsettled feelings inside, and I wonder if that’s from the transition, from active dislike to a friendlier coexistence. Having the feelings I’ve had regarding her over the past year and a third while going through the process of recovering from what she did and how she handled it I think means that those feelings have a certain momentum to them and accepting this olive branch she’s offered—the turbulence of being willing to feel differently about her—my guess would be that it’s not unexpected.

As we rang off she said, “We should get together some time” and I agreed in a friendly tone, though I didn’t feel very comfortable with it. I guess I’m not prepared to move quickly on this rapprochement—don’t want to rush into it. The beginnings of the feelings that would make it possible to be with her without aversion are happening now, but I don’t know if they’re quite strong enough to hang a bucket on yet.

I have a vision, sort of a big picture about what’s happened. Basically my nature is to speak openly about a rift, take responsibility for my part and work with the other person to see what needs to be done to heal it. It’s clear to me that Darlene is unable to do that because she cannot bear a ghost of a hint of criticism about herself and therefore cannot acknowledge if something she has done has been hurtful—and because of this limitation it makes the kind of healing I’d ordinarily prefer impossible. Instead I have to accept that a rift with her will mean I need to honor my need to stay away for a while until my hurt feelings calm down some, and then I can accept an olive branch and consider it done.

I think the hardest thing I have to forgive her for was the tone she took with me of demanding I give her some information when I’d just told her that I preferred to not at that particular moment. It was the way something in her flared. Something negative in her feelings about me she gave free rein to for a moment.

So I know that I need to be aware of this, in the same way I’d negotiate any hazard in just my physical environment.

We have an intellectual side in common, and I think that’s going to be our intersecting point to give us something to connect about.

As a little aside to this, I had an insight about characterizing people’s behavior. I had an example pop into my mind about how, even as a child I’d see that my mom had mischaracterized something my father had said: she’d think he’d been deadly serious about something when it was clear to me that he’d been joking. I feel my mom had mischaracterized some of our relatives when she’d relate to me a story where she felt victimized by one of them. I feel that I’ve tried to stay true to what I thought was the manner and message of someone at any given time. I’m fairly sure that I did not mischaracterize Darlene when she spoke to me the way she did at the theater—that tone and the feelings it called out in me were as real as the floor I stood on. She later tried to re-characterize it—tried to say that her tone HAD been respectful and accepting, but I know it was not.

I think that Gary thinks I mischaracterize; maybe that’s too strong a statement. Maybe he thinks I mischaracterize his mom; and I think that’s part of the hurt that I feel that he didn’t stand behind me more solidly and provide more emotional support through that whole thing; I just think that to him what I said about what had happened was unreal.

Anyway, I’m acknowledging the reality that these are true facts that happened and feeling better about Darlene doesn’t change that. I suppose I’m experimenting to find a balance with them: does thinking about them increase my dislike and aversion for her? Is it therefore an error to think about them or mention them?

I think it is important for me to acknowledge the truth, period, and not flinch from it.

NOW I’ll go take my bath.

10/29/05

I just thought of a few things. One, that I fear the worst of my motives. That is, if I have a certain feeling, it is my habit to interpret it in light of what I fear the most it means…kind of in service to being honest with myself. It just now occurs to me that maybe there’s a childhood root to that. When I was either 4, or 6—I think I was 4. A neighbor accused me of having taken something; and in my mind I thought I must have because they were so sure. I got into huge trouble, spankings and threats of going to jail. I didn’t find the toy because I couldn’t. I looked, though. I remember feeling that what it meant to tell the truth was that you admit to what you were accused of. I was confused; and now I wonder if that sort of primary conception of the truth had its roots there, in that trauma. I was very traumatized, and it makes me tearful to think of it even now. It’s still immediate on one level.

Two, I realized as I was vacuuming that the nature of my background thoughts is that most of them are conversations. I meander, in my background internal noise, from conversation to conversation. Since I’ve started writing a lot of this stuff about x I’ve noticed I’ve had a lot of conversations with him in my mind—usually ones that affirm an attraction, and also are kind of working out about the fact that I’m attracted to him and he’s married. (I will admit too that I have a fantasy that we go right up to the boundaries of sexual expression and make a decision that we won’t pursue it based on that fact.)

What if I were to find, though, that what I’m taking for granted isn’t true? What I’m taking for granted is that they have the kind of relationship that would be devastated by him expressing sexuality with someone else. I take it for granted because that seems to be the default mode for most couples. (I have been thinking about [a long ago boyfriend] recently, in light of this stuff. I think for the first time ever I’m able to have some sympathy for his being irresistibly drawn toward curiosity about someone else’s sexuality. There’s a part of me that protests as I say that, the visceral part that responded with such outrage when I read about it in his journal. But I think now I can see that it IS possible to love someone and still want to express sexually with someone who is intriguing. I’d really bought into the idea that love means sexual loyalty—love means not pursuing a sexual route with someone else, and that one partner’s doing that pursuing amounts to huge damage of the primary relationship. I’ve been married 14 years almost, and 16 of it monogamous , and for the first time I see the merit in this idea. It doesn’t have to be a personal slap, a devastating slap, for a partner to have sex with somebody else.) Yeah, it just seems so ubiquitous, that idea that sex with someone else has to mean the end of trust and maybe the end of the relationship that it seems like TRUTH. I suppose it’s really just a convention, the way that it’s a convention to say that the work “fuck” is obscene. We just agree to that.

Anyway, if x and his wife were the type that didn’t see sex with other people as something devastating,…wow, wouldn’t that be cool.

So I think what happens, what’s been happening, is that I feel this attraction, and that seems to spawn lots of conversations in my head that make me feel really warm and happy, and then I realize it’s just an imaginary conversation. Or I feel that it’s not compatible for me to be imagining these conversations on account of his wife.